Traces: plankton on the move

Traces is a collaboration between the artist Cynthia Beth Rubin and the Menden-Deuer Lab at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, which studies plankton, the microscopic marine creatures that comprise the most basic piece of our food chain. The original micro-captures are of specimens in small batches of water, devoid of any association with their native environment, and filmed in flat grays. In Rubin's transformation of the raw video, she imagines the plankton moving in water that is infinitely deep, making these mystical creatures leap beyond the confines of the microscopic world into an enticing world of color and movement that begs us to relate to them as part of nature. She does not just reveal the generally unseen life in our ocean waters; she makes it accessible.